After nearly five decades of supplying landscape contractors in Colorado and Arizona, Pioneer Sand Co. is rolling out a new retail strategy designed to put it head-to-head with the country’s largest home improvement retailers.
The Highlands Ranch company, rebranded as Pioneer Landscape Centers, on Saturday will introduce a new store concept in Littleton that includes a 3,000-square-foot retail center designed to draw in consumers not accustomed to visiting material yards, as well as faster loading times for contractors.
“The goal is give them a very nice shopping experience and a better process than they are experiencing from Home Depot and Lowe’s,” said Sagi Cohen, CEO of Pioneer, which is fully owned by New York private equity firm JLL Partners.
Instead of having only 50 landscaping products to shop from at the big box retailers, customers will have access to around 3,000, many sourced directly from the nearly two dozen quarries and two manufacturing plants that Pioneer owns.
“You can get any product you can imagine in any color you can imagine, and we can charge less than they do,” Cohen said. Customers can view products in a more comfortable retail setting, ask sales staff questions about them and zip out on an electric golf cart to view the items in a material yard spanning six acres.
Pioneer plans to bring the more consumer-centered design to its 14 Colorado stores and 17 Arizona stores, while also establishing stores in new states, primarily Texas and California. As part of the expansion, the company plans to acquire quarries and manufacturing plants so it can supply local products.
Since its start back in 1968 in Colorado Springs, Pioneer Sand has been primarily a business-to-business vendor supplying contractors. But Cohen, who joined the company three months ago, said when he looked to the future, he realized growth would come from the consumer market.
Small buyers have long been able to purchase direct from Pioneer, but the company never positioned itself as a consumer retail center, said Jon Schallert, a retail strategist based in Longmont.
Schallert said the company’s deep product inventory, supply chain control and higher level of customer service, which includes delivery, should allow it to compete and win against the much larger retailers.
“Pioneer has been a leader in this category. I don’t think they will fail at all,” he said, adding that landscape materials, because of their bulk, are insulated from retail’s move online.
While designed to appeal to the do-it-yourselfer, the new retail centers will also benefit contractors, Cohen said.
Rather than having to haul samples around or describe options, contractors can bring clients to Pioneer and let them pick exactly what they want. And the new design includes changes that streamline the checkout process for contractors buying materials from an average of 25 minutes to seven or eight minutes.
The landscaping-materials industry is fragmented and, in most places, still dominated by smaller family-run operations. By boosting brand recognition and entering more markets, Cohen’s bigger plan is to create a dominant player in a small niche.
“We want to be the name that will lead this industry,” he said.
If successful, the new retail strategy could boost employment at the company’s headquarters in Highlands Ranch. Pioneer employs 100 people at its headquarters and expects to add more as it expands.
Prior to joining Pioneer, Cohen worked for 10 years as the CEO of Ceasarstone USA. While there, he took kitchen countertops, which many considered a commodity product, and created a recognized brand and a public company currently valued at more than $1 billion.
